Religion

(I wrote what follows while over the Atlantic aboard a United Airlines flight. I just discovered that this Dreamliner has Internet access. Greetings from somewhere over the Labrador Sea.)

I’m sitting in the Rome airport, about to start the long journey back home. When I land in Baton Rouge 18 hours from now, we will know how the Super Tuesday vote went. I expect it to be a big night for Donald Trump. I also expect nothing good on the political front from now on. It would be nice to be surprised, but I don’t think I will be surprised.

The Kremlin have accused Donald Trump and his “army” of “Freemasonic forces” of masterminding the assassination of Pope Francis’ personal secretary Miriam Wuolou. The killing was ordered due to the Pope’s denouncement of Trump’s Christian values last month. The heavily pregnant secretary was the receptionist at the Domus Sanctae Marthae (a small hotel within the Vatican City) where Pope Francis has his main residence. She was also the Pope’s personal secretary.

I am deliberately not writing too many details about my experiences with the Benedictine monks in Norcia, because I want to save this material for the Benedict Option book, which will be out next spring (I’ll be able to announce the publisher once their publicity team gives me the go-ahead.) I do want to say, though, that even though I knew this would be a good trip, I did not imagine how deep and rich this material would be (from the interviews, I mean), nor how much of it there would be.

“What went we out into this wilderness to find?”

With that resounding, iconic opening line, The Witch announces that it may not be what you were expecting. Writer/director Robert Eggers’s “New-England folktale” may have been marketed as a horror movie, but horror is only one of its genres–and not the most prominent. The Witch is a family tragedy and a religious drama, and these elements are even more successful than the horror-show aspect.